Frankenstein (1931) Audio Preservation

[crissrudd4554]

There's another thing I didnt note in my sampled videos mostly cause its the same scenario as the missing reverb to the growl in the one scene I did note. Anyways, it's in the scene where Henry is notified of Waldman's death. After Victor says '(The Monster)'s been seen in the hills terrorizing the mountainside' we hear the Monster growl implying he's nearby. On the VHS/LD the growl has reverb, on the BD it doesnt. This wasnt in your sync log Jerry but perhaps you know what I'm speaking of. Not that this matters since we're using the LD track anyways, just thought I'd mention it.

[crissrudd4554]

Just watching my VHS edition then checked the BD version. When Baron and Elizabeth head up the stairs of the watch tower, before they do so Baron says 'Whe-where are you me dear? Oh there you are! Let's go and see what's up the awful stairs!'. Perhaps its me but on the VHS it almost sounds like it cuts briefly to another source when he says 'awful stairs'. Since the VHS version is essentially the same as the LD track its probably the same there. Also when it cuts to them heading up the stairs the change in quality is quite noticeable so I dont think Im going out on a limb here. On the BD the quality doesnt change much. You still hear a 'click' when 'awful stairs' comes up but listening closely I think thats a foot step. What do you think??

[jerryshadoe]

I'll answer more on Monday... got a ton going on, computer tied up in a 40 hour video encode for a project and .... yeah, man... really busy and trying to type all of this on my Android which has a little slide out qwerty keyboard but still, this sucks... LOL

This project is making me go crazy and I'm grateful that I have a few projects moving forward now, as a friend gave me a much needed 2TB drive so I can finish rendering masters for stuff that has been in the works for over a year now and got stalled due to lack of space and I couldn't just delete stuff as I would have been deleting stage of my work...

Anyway, will post more on monday or tuesday....

[crissrudd4554]

Sounds good. Take your time.

[jerryshadoe]

Ok, so the comments you made about the audio quality changing abruptly here and there is something that I mentioned in one of my earlier posts. There are multiple parts throughout the entire film where in the same shot (not just the same scene!) the quality of the audio changes not just from actor to actor, but even during a dialog sequence showing the same, one person speaking - the quality shifts back and forth between decent and an obvious dupe.

I honestly think, that there is no version of this film anywhere that contains the entire soundtrack and contains it all sourced from a single master. This film was butchered and then put back together from scraps found all over the place. When we consider the poor quality of the masters at the time this film was made (and the limited dynamic range) and add to that the fact that a lot of the audio comes from audio that was a copy of a copy of... well, you get the picture, which means even more degradation.

Fortunately, some of the foreign masters survived in slightly better shape (although some of those, like the original French dub from 1932, are gone forever) and it's interesting to hear some of the sound effects so clearly compared to the English master (even on the LD) where if you crank up the volume of the track by about 10db, you start hearing (amongst a shit-load of noise) some of the "lost" ambiance that is preserved better on the foreign dubs.

The problem with all of this is, like I mentioned earlier, determining which sound effects "belong" and which just "sound nice." I am going over everything slowly and moving forward with this project. I have been stalled on working on it due to my little health "dip" and then all the work I had to catch up on for my job. I also got a nice gift of a much needed HDD and have started moving some other projects forward.

This audio reconstruction is a bitch - point blank - and I'm gonna keep at it and will post updates here whenever there is something relevant to share, however I can't give you an ETA on completion as doing this by myself, with the amount of time that is necessary to do this right; I'll be working on this for a while.

[crissrudd4554]

Sorry. I actually vaguely remember now you saying how the quality of the dialogue changes in instances midsentence on the track suggesting the combination of different sources. So ok it wasnt just me. And its been a tough time for all of us Jerry. As Ive always said take your time, no rush.

[jerryshadoe]

No worries man, this has turned into a pretty long thread and we have gone over many things

I appreciate the fact that you are not rushing me, but I would just like to finish this asap, so the one "rushing me" would be me

Side-note: the fact that the quality of the original audio is not consistent is actually helpful in my reconstruction effort, as it "masks" some of my spices. If the track was "flawless," then my splices would be a lot more obvious, especially considering the fact that the quality of the sources varies a lot. The interesting thing about the dub tracks is the fact that their quality is also inconsistent throughout the film. Furthermore, the quality varies so much, that there have been a few instances where I thought the sound effect was different on the dub (vs the English master) until I matched the volume to the English master and synced it perfect, where I would realize that it's the same sound effect, but "sounds different" due to the quality difference (in some cases the English is superior and in some it's inferior) so I have had to contend with this as well.

Like I said, this reconstruction effort is a pain in the... The biggest challenge I am facing is filling in the parts where there is music/foley and there was foreign dialog in those parts that I had to splice out... The foley should be easy to duplicate from "useable" parts (i.e. where there is no dialog) and nearly all the sound effects will be easy to fix as well, but the music... There are a couple parts, where even with the different timing of the dialog in the dubs, there is still little snippets of music missing here and there and I have to figure out how to address this issue. I will be "ripping" the music sequences apart to see if any parts are repeated or are so similar that I can seamlessly blend them in for the missing portions. What makes this part even more complicated is the fact that the quality is not consistent between the various sources, so not only do I have to reconstruct the music, but also I have to try to make it as seamless as possible, before I layer it into the actual English master track. Here, some of the quality inconsistencies will also be "masked" by the layering of the English master over the reconstructed music. So, there are multiple different factors I have to take into consideration when working on this.

Even with all the complications that I have to contend with to assemble this, I am having fun doing this because it is a challenge and is really putting my skills of nearly two decades of audio work, to the test. Interestingly, I am still learning new things while working on this, to the point where I had to do some research on some very sophisticated methods of filtering audio that I never needed to use before. Without some of these methods I would not be able to do this reconstruction... well, that's a lie, I would but it would sound obviously spliced together, kinda like watching an HD source of a film, spliced in with bootleg workprint VHS footage - the quality shifts would be jarring. However, unlike a poor quality VHS recording, which can't have resolution "recovered," in the case of audio there are some tricks that can be played to fix some (but NOT all) of the damage. Here, finding a "happy medium" is tricky as well, as if the audio is over-processed then it sounds just as bad as if it was unprocessed at all. And since, like I mentioned before, the quality of the audio tracks are inconsistent (even within the tracks themselves) I am having to filter the splices I am using differently, which adds time to how long this takes to finish.

I have also been looking at some of the inconsistencies in the English master and seeing if any of these can be fixed to make things a little more smoother sounding. It's funny, because some reviews of the English BD audio claim that it sounds better due to the fact that they "fixed" some of these inconsistencies there, but they really didn't. The track has been so over-zealously processed for noise, that the audio all appears to "flow smoothly," including the "God" line that was restored using an obviously inferior source. Basically, they degraded all the audio to the "same level of degradation" to make it sound consistent. What I am attempting is the exact opposite of that: I am trying to match the lower quality parts to the superior quality of the rest. Interestingly, some of this is done by introducing noise to certain parts, minor tweaking, and then removing some of the overall noise from the "final" track to get an actual "final track" that sounds right.

Sorry if some of my explanation of the process seems confusing, but I'm trying to explain this stuff best I can without getting extremely technical which would just make everything harder to understand...

[monks19]

Man... I wonder how the original sound on disc woud have sounded like ? Would it have been more consistant at all or botchy like the blu-ray/dvd ?

[jerryshadoe]

I'm curious about that too and am hoping that when I have a more complete reconstruction assembled, that I will be able to pursue accessing those. The thing that worries me more than anything, is that those might not be all too great either, due to wear and tear and the incredibly old age of those, plus the limited fidelity of those discs to begin with...

Similar to an LP, there may be parts that sound better because the disc doesn't have scratches and/or warping there, whereas parts might end up being useless... Unfortunately, until I listen to them myself, this is all speculation...

[crissrudd4554]

It's funny, because some reviews of the English BD audio claim that it sounds better due to the fact that they "fixed" some of these inconsistencies there, but they really didn't. The track has been so over-zealously processed for noise, that the audio all appears to "flow smoothly," including the "God" line that was restored using an obviously inferior source. Basically, they degraded all the audio to the "same level of degradation" to make it sound consistent. What I am attempting is the exact opposite of that: I am trying to match the lower quality parts to the superior quality of the rest.

Essentially confirming my theory that the main track was likely degraded to flow consistent with the 'God' line and/or vice versa. I know they say less is more but this is ridiculous. Anyways its times like these I wish I was an expert on things like this but I dont really have the right tools, money, and, to a degree, time to put the right amount of effort into this. I likely would have come up with something I'd likely consider decent but probably not for others. Remember the long discussion we had about burning a DVD with audio tracks?? Well what produced the best results was degrading the 16gb movie to 7gb and convert my tracks to AAC files. Sure the results for my standards were 'good enough', but definitely was below something that could have been better. To put it bluntly I'm lazy. I guess that's another reason why Im glad I've placed this into your hands. Because I love this film so much I'd rather it be checked out by someone who appreciates the argument and basis of the project. You think its taking you long?? If I was doing it we probably wouldnt see it til sometime next year at the earliest!

Anyways when I havent been checking this thread, I try to spread word around, not necessarily of the project, just of how flawed the BD track is. You already saw my whole discussion of this on CHFB so thats nothing new here. Funny even though I didnt start speaking out on this til after the BD came out, this is something thats been bugging me since probably 2008! Around that time was when I noticed the bits missing on the then current DVD versions. And also it wasnt til I actually had my VHS burned to a DVD-R and made comparisons that I realized how superior it was to the official DVD. When the BDs were announced, I was so hoping this would be fixed. Nada. Same track with little to no change. Sure perhaps hearing it as a DTS 2.0 track on a BD is better than a Dolby 2.0 track on DVD but that doesnt change the fact its the same flawed track.

Anyways back to what i said about 'spreading the word'. One site I posted to was blu-ray.com, a site I only try to post to once in a while. To me, that sites almost like another originaltrilogy.com. Just a bunch of ignorant know it alls who've even called me out a few times. Anyways a few responded to my sample videos. Here's a quote from someone who agreed with me:

"Based on your examples, and assuming they were properly re-captured and done the same for each, I would have to agree with you. I'm an ex-recording engineer myself and I think what happened here was that they decided that getting rid of noise was more important than preserving what little high frequencies there were. There's always a tendency to do too much whether it's adjusting audio or in the case of photography, which I also do a lot of, over post-processing the image. My strategy when I make such adjustments is to always back off from where I originally thought it should be.

It sounds to me like they reduced the high end to get rid of the hiss and then increased the mid lower frequencies to "fatten-up" the sound and give it more body. There's another possibility, although it would be kind of scary if this is what happened: it's possible that they didn't run the optical tracks through a playback preamp that applied the Academy Curve rolloff. Or, they did, but they used a modern or retrofitted playback device that used modern red LED or laser photocells. That would result in inferior sound quality on soundtracks that weren't recorded with red photocells.

I was at an AES meeting last year in which someone presented a new restoration of a Benny Goodman at Carnegie Hall concert that I believe was recorded in 1936. Previous versions of this were missing segments and have been considered poor in overall audio quality. This new restoration was done from newly found original acetates. I thought I was impressed until they did a comparison to the previous version. I might have been in the minority, but I preferred that previous version - while it had a lot more noise, it also had a lot more high end and the high end, IMO, is what gives music its life and vibrancy. So a very similar situation to that of Frankenstein.

But I have to admit that without a direct comparison of the various versions of Frankenstein, I don't think I would have noticed the difference."

Here's a quote from someone who disagreed with me:

"I hear the differences in tone, fidelity and pitch that I think you're alluding to, but I don't hear any missing dialogue. The reverb on the Monster's growl is there on the 1991 VHS track, and not on the BD, but that's a strange. The growl is most likely an overdub done in the original audio mix in '31, not something recorded with the action on screen. As such it may have acquired reverb as it was duped over the decades. Who knows? The soundtrack on the VHS is not closer to the original audio source than the BD, and that's just a fact. So your preference is for the characteristics of a duped soundtrack, one or two or maybe more generations from the original recording(s). I'm fairly certain the audio on the BD is as close to the original recording(s) that Universal has in their vaults.

If that's what you like (duped audio), then that's what you like, but I don't think that means I should feel unhappy about the BD soundtrack because "parts" are missing, no, there's another problem. I've listened to the BD many times with headphones on, and I think the "funnel" effect that you mention is because it's being presented on BD in DTS Master Audio 2.0. When I play it through my surround audio receiver, I hear the soundtrack coming out of center AND the left and right speakers. This is not the way it should be. It should, being a mono film, only have audio coming out of the center speaker. I think they've presented it in 2.0 for a "fat mono" effect. I can live with it, it just means I have to make sure when I'm listening without headphones that I'm not seated too left or right. I don't like it, but it doesn't ruin the BD for me.

As for what your problem is with it, I think it's like wanting the image of a color film to have a warmer temperature rather than a cooler one, with no two sets of eyes being able to agree as to what is correct for their personal tastes. You seem to prefer the "warmer" audio of the '91 VHS. I'm fine with the colder, crisper audio of the BD. It really is a moot matter, because they are what they are. I really can't see Universal putting audio from a VHS onto a new edition of the BD transfer. As with most of home video, we're stuck with what we have. Live with it."

Well to say the least they both had their points. The guy who disagreed with me responded to a comment I made earlier on there about how I miss grain and dirt in some of these movies. At the bottom of his post he said something like 'thank God you're not in the majority'. So frankly his opinion really means nothing to me, especially considering he didnt know what the hell I was trying to prove with my videos until I practically spelled it out for him, and its people like that that are making me lose interests in thread sites (this and a couple Monster sites are my only exceptions). Anyways I think I've spoken long enough here haha but yeah just wanted to post my updates here. Even though I may have not posted as much I still think about this project and am excited for the final results. Also one last thing Jerry. The photo gallery on the DVD/BD (called The Frankenstein Archives) uses dialogue from the film incase you needed any additional sources for the main English track. It doesnt have the missing sounding effects you keep talking about but it does have the full 'God' line. However its pretty much spliced together similar to those documentary snippets I had sent you before so pretty useless there then. Anyways just thought I'd throw it out there.